Friday, February 3, 2017

The Awakening

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

In 1899, Kate
Chopin published a short novel called The
Awakening. Considered controversial at the time for its feminist themes and
the candid way in which it deals with female sexuality, it has gone on to
become a major headache for unsuspecting high-school and college literature
students everywhere.

Thankfully, this
essay has nothing to do with it.

The "awakening"
I'm referring to was—for lack of a better term—an event that took place
during my freshman year of high school, though it was not related to school
itself. In June of 1988, I celebrated my fourteenth birthday. One of the gifts
I received was a Nintendo game called The
Legend of Zelda. Since then, it has spawned numerous sequels across
numerous systems, has been featured in cartoons and comic books, and has
appeared on T-shirts, tote bags, and even cereal boxes, but at the time it was
a brand-new thing.

I had gotten a
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) the previous Christmas, and, having grown
weary of Super Mario Bros., the game that
came with it and of which I had at one time been a rabid fan, and Elevator Action, the second title I had
picked up, I was eager to get into something else. I had no idea what Zelda was all about. At that time, the
Internet as we know it today didn't exist, of course, so you could only get
information about NES games from Nintendo
Fun Club News (the precursor to Nintendo
Power), to which I did not have a subscription, or from word of mouth. I
didn't know anyone who had played the game, but I had seen a lot of commercials
for it, so I decided to give it a shot. After all, Nintendo had cultivated a
reputation for quality, so the odds of its being a letdown were slim.

I imagine that
for many players Zelda was a
revolutionary game, as it was for me. Up to that point, most console games
lacked an adventure component. The aforementioned Super Mario Bros., for example, only allowed you to go in a
predetermined direction, and backtracking was not permitted. If you missed
something, you had no choice but to suck it up and keep going. Zelda was different. Its world was open
and, for the time, vast. You could revisit areas again and again. In fact, one
of the chief elements of the game was exploration. You were not told what to do
or how to do it. You had to figure everything out through trial and error, to
traverse deadly forests and spooky graveyards to find the entrances to the game's
various levels. You had to determine how weapons and items worked and when they
should be used. A map and instruction manual were included, but they only told
you so much. Every now and then a wise old man in a cave would give you a clue,
but it was often cryptic. For the most part, you were on your own.

Computer-game
players were already familiar with this kind of thing. Games like Ultima, Wizardry, and Bard's Tale
worked this way. The difference was that while these games required exploration
and puzzle solving, they lacked action. The outcomes of battles were resolved
by the computer, in a fashion similar to tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs). In
a sense, the computer rolled the dice for you during an encounter and told you
the outcome. In many of these games, the player controlled an entire party of
characters rather than just one. The reason for this is that tabletop games
like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) are designed to be played
by a group rather than an individual, with each player having a specific
function within the party (a fighter for combat, a wizard for magic, a cleric
for healing, et cetera).

Zelda, by contrast,was an action game through and through. It required fast reflexes
and could be terribly frustrating at times, particularly if you wandered into
an area filled with monsters you were not prepared to fight. Like computer
adventure games, it had an overhead view rather than a side-scrolling one. Its
closest antecedent was the Atari 2600's Adventure,
but while this game required exploration and experimentation and featured
rudimentary action sequences (mostly running from dragons or trying to stab
them), it was much smaller in scope, did not allow you to carry more than one
item at a time, and had primitive graphics due to the system's limitations. No
one had seen anything like Zelda before.

As I recall, it
took me about a month to conquer it. For those four weeks, it was pretty much
all I thought about. I even took the map with me when we went on vacation. It
was the most immersive game I had ever encountered. But the experience of
playing the game, while rewarding, was not the most important thing. I got
something much greater out of it. It was my introduction to fantasy.

As an avid
collector of Masters of the Universe (MoTU) action figures and a
devoted fan of the tie-in cartoon during my younger years, I had been exposed
to the concept of fantasy, but I had never really thought of it as a genre. I
didn't even know what "genre" meant. I just found it cool that the
warriors fought with swords and axes and that there were magic and monsters
involved. D&D had become huge by the early 1980s, and many toy lines
reflected its influence. I was a fan of many of the MoTU knockoffs, as
well, including Thundercats, Blackstar, and The Other World,
the first two of which also had their own cartoons. There was even a toy line
actually based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was the
preeminent version of the game at the time.

The most
memorable figure was probably Warduke, who was later made into a miniature as
part of the D&D Miniatures set "War Drums." Of course,
there was also the D&D cartoon (the "Advanced" was likely
removed to prevent confusion, although that didn't stop DC Comics from using it
in the title of its early-'90s comic book series), which was fairly
controversial due to the absurd allegations that the game was linked to
suicide, antisocial behavior, and devil worship. I can remember watching it
standing up so I could keep an eye on the door of my parents' bedroom. Not even
kidding.

By the time Zelda
came along I hadn't given fantasy much thought in several years, having become
instead interested in Garbage Pail Kids, Madballs, and horror
films like Friday the 13th and ANightmare on Elm
Street. Soon after I began playing it, I became intrigued by Zelda's
fantasy setting, and when I had finished the game I began looking for others in
a similar vein. When school started, I met a guy named John (with whom I remain
friends to this day), who was a computer- and console-game enthusiast, an RPG
player, and a fan of speculative fiction. He was the first full-on nerd I had
ever met, and I mean that as an enormous compliment. He introduced me to D&D,
Commodore 64 adventure games (with their cloth maps and copy-protection
wheels), and Dragonlance novels. (I subsequently turned him onto Forgotten
Realms novels, thus returning the favor.) It didn't take long to realize
that I was onto something big.

At the start of
1989, I began collecting comic books. I had grown up enjoying Superfriends,
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and The Incredible Hulk on
Saturday mornings, but I was a reluctant reader, so I had never bought many comics.
Even though most comic books are not fantasy in the strictest sense, they
feature speculative tales of a similar nature and borrow elements from fantasy,
so there are, therefore, a lot of crossover fans. There's a reason that many
comic-book shops also carry RPG books and accessories.

The "awakening"
was, hence, my discovery of fantasy fandom. In the span of just a few months, I
had found my niche, and I have remained there ever since. Today, I have a
comic-book and magazine collection that would have made fourteen-year-old me
lose control of his bodily functions. I have well over 700 miniatures, a
plethora of dice (especially d20s, my favorites), and a number of publications
related to fantasy games going back to the 1970s, which are just engaging to
read. I have used my writing ability as a means of sharing my passion,
contributing to the hobby, and "giving back" to the community. I have
found incalculable joy in the books and games I have picked up during the last
28 years.

I cannot imagine
what my life would have been like if I had never slid The Legend of Zelda
into my Nintendo Entertainment System in the summer of 1988. Traversing the
environs of the fictional world of Hyrule helped me discover myself.